While Ford is pretty often seen as a Western enterprise with Western-focused culture, we know they liked to keep an open minded approach to their business. As such, they always left an open door for Eastern bloc countries of Europe. Whether it the Ford-licensed GAZ AA or the Romanian Ford factory from the 1930s, Ford was ever-so present around these parts of the world. In this case, it was Ford’s Y-block V8, which was manufactured in Romania in a distinctly unique version, to go along with its distinct exhaust burble.

By the end of the 1950s, Romania was leaving the Second World War wounds behind and embarking on a new stage of forced communist industrialization. Furthermore, the country’s leaders wanted a politically and economically neutral country and thus began to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. The Americans saw this as a breech between the Warsaw Pact countries and helped Romania with their industrial know-how to consolidate its economy. Ford quickly jumped in on the technology transfer, offering a license to its still-modern Y block V8. They did this in the hopes of getting even more automotive contracts from the Romanian industry in future.

Ford’s dreams aside, the V8 found a home in the new Steagul Rosu (Romanian for “Red Flag”) 131/132, a new range of 3 and 5 ton trucks to be launched in 1960. While the chassis was largely carried over from the predecessor, SR 101 (a copy of Zil-150), the cab had to be all new, to show everyone the “unstoppable socialist progress”. As no factory in Romania had any sort of experience in mass producing and designing modern car/bus bodies, the cab and tooling were developed by the French company Chausson. The cab design seems all-American to the naked eye but it is actually inspired in the lower half by the 1953 Citroen Type 55 (lower image; also designed by Chausson). The upper half and cab sides have a clear US influence to them, resembling Chevrolet and Ford trucks of the era.

The Y block itself got a thorough reworking for its new home in Romania. Firstly, all the dimensions were transformed to metric; the bore is 97mm/3.82 in and the stroke 85mm/3.35 in, making the 5.025cc/306 ci engine unique in Fords Y line-up, sitting somewhere between the 292 and the 312 V8 in displacement. Since the biggest Ford Y block for trucks was the 292 ci, I suspect the Romanian version is a bored and stroked version of that. Its 3.82″ bore is actually a bit more than the 312’s 3.80 bore, and its 3.35″ stroke is a bit more than the 292’s 3.30″ stroke. An oddball in the Y-Block family.

It definitely shares the biggest intake valves 1.93 in/49mm and exhaust valves 1.51 in/38.5mm of the Y engine family, the metric dimensions corresponding almost perfectly with the American ones. The 6.7:1 (later 7.2:1) compression ratio is pretty low for this engine, a tribute to the poor gas quality in Romania at that time. The power is also given in the metric DIN Norm, producing 140HP@3600rpm and 320Nm@2100rpm, so maybe around 170HP SAE gross hp. Other than this, the Romanian V8 is pretty similar to the 292 Y block, including its crossplane crankshaft, the unusual firing order of the cylinders (1-5-4-8-6-3-7-2), making that distinctive Y-V8 burble on the go and the unusual intake/exhaust arrangement as can be seen in the pictures. The first engines were even delivered with Holley 2 barrel carburetors!

The new truck made quite an impression. With 45HP more than the immediate predecessor, and helped by a 4-speed gearbox, the SRs 131/132 pushed a good 55mph top speed. The trucks were rugged enough and easy to maintain, which made them highly praised by drivers and state accountants alike. The typical Y block oiling issues were sorted out by this time, and the stiff bottom end remained, helping these machines reach over 60,000 miles before needing any internal work. It sounds laughable today, but you have to consider the local industry’s lack of experience in building this sort of engines, untrained drivers, and the poor gas quality, rarely going over CO 65. And then truck work is just more demanding on an engine, and these trucks were worked hard.

At some point the piston rings would fail to seal, oil would be consumed in copious quantities, and the engine would need an overhaul. Fuel consumption was seen as average, in the order of 25L/100km or 9.5 mpg down to 35L/100km or 6.7 mpg. One cannot help but wonder if this is the most American truck to come out of the eastern block countries. While the 1964 ZIL 130 also had a longhood design, it definitely had much more Russian technology under its hood.

Anyway, like US V8s, the 1973 fuel crisis made the SR 131 look like the gas guzzler that it was, especially in Europe. As a result, the V8 engine’s days were numbered, finally ending production in 1975. The truck/cab combo would soldier on though. Renamed as a DAC 6135 and re-motorised with a licensed SAVIEM inline 6 diesel of 135HP. The cab received a facelift too, if we can call moving the front lights in the bumper a facelift. They weren’t fooling anyone, though.

During the 1980s, the cab was refreshed once again with a more squared off design and a fiberglass hood. Well, almost, as that top half of the cab inspired from the 1950s was still there, the last American reminiscence on this long line of trucks.

Production ended in the early 1990s after a good run of 40 years, but these trucks were in regular civilian and army use as late as 2005. Almost all of them were run in the ground with minimal maintenance during the 1990s. By that time you couldn’t see a SR/DAC truck of any kind on the road without a heavy smoking exhaust, bold tires and slightly bent chassis. They were finally superseded in the light/medium truck duty by the boxy ROMAN 8.135, this time a MAN licensed truck.

And the Ford licensed V8? Well, after production ended 1975, it served in these trucks and various Romanian built buses, finally disappearing from the Romanian roads during the 1980s. The army kept them longer thanks to the gas engine’s ability to start better than the breathless SAVIEM diesel in cold weather. The V8 was reincarnated in the form of the 1962 derivate half-a-V8 four to power the Romanian offroader ARO. Through small redesigns, the OHV four managed (if barely) to cross the 21 century mark in production. But that’s another story for another time…

Editor’s note: The Ford Y-Block was also built in Argentina (by Ford Argentina) from 1961 all the way through the late 1980s, and was even bestowed with some Windsor-like heads along the way. The full story on that, and a bit more Y-Block insight, is here:

Very interesting, the forbidden fruit (it’s all relative, of course) trucks from the Eastern Bloc. Tatra did very well here in the seventies with their air cooled 6×6 conventional trucks, but that’s about it. The Tatra was a real bargain, given its excellent off-road capabilities.

One minor thing, the green Citroën dump truck is a Type 23, 1958 in this case. The bigger Type 55 looked very similar though.

New and unexpected is the way that I too would describe this story. In all of my looks into Communist bloc cars and trucks, I did not know about Steagul Rosu, and even if I had known about it, I never would have guessed that they had Ford engines under the hood.

In the photos of early pre-facelift examples of this model, I see another influence in the style of the front end: the Soviet UAZ-469 military jeep. The grille and headlight area has the same shapes as on the UAZ-469, on a much larger scale, somewhat like the resemblance between the Mercedes-Benz Unimog and L-Series trucks. As far as I know, ARO produced only the UAZ-49 and not the UAZ-469, but that does not mean that the Romanian designers at Steagul Rosu could not have done some conscious or unconscious copying of a prominent Soviet design.

The 1971 introduction date of the UAZ-469 torpedoes my theory. Perhaps the influence went the other way, with the UAZ styling department (a junior engineer with a ruler, probably) sneaking in an homage to the American V-8s that they admired from afar but could never have. 🙂

That is a very good observation…. i think the Hongqi block is also an Y block. 2 screws are holding the valve cover, distributor is at the back of the engine, crankcase breather is at the front. But, as far as i know, and there is little info here, the Ford V8 arrived in Romania through the cab designer Chausson. They had strong ties with Ford of France and they were using commercial Ford chassis to built their bodies on. Ford never gave Steagul Rosu (or the romanian state) any official license.

Very interesting! I somehow assumed we always felt Romania’s government was as much an enemy as the Soviet Union, like Albania, whatever rifts may have existed between them and the Soviets, so I’m surprised we would have helped them out. In any case, this seems even more exotic than the Turkish DeSoto trucks I learned about first on CC before seeing a few on a recent visit to Turkey. Regarding the slightly different bore and stroke numbers … having been involved in some metrification in the US in the late ’70’s, I wonder if the block and crank were really different, or if this was just spec rounding to the nearest whole mm.

They should have included a smaller pickup truck version for Romanian farmers and the like.
I remember the Desoto Fargo trucks in Turkey when we lived there during 60s. They were offered as a light duty pickup to a large heavy duty commercial that were as common as semis in U.S.

That was more interesting than it should be. I know what a Y-Block is, but I didn’t know they have whatever kind of crankshaft that was or that it had a weird firing order (no doubt related) resulting in a certain sound.

“We know they (Ford) liked to keep an open minded approach to their business.” I’ll tell you how open minded they were – do you remember the black-and-white footage from WWII showing all those German trucks and troop carriers trundling toward the Marne, and later, the Battle of the Bulge? You might wonder, how was it that the Germans were able to produce such quantities of materiel – Hitler inherited an economy in shambles when he rose to leadership in the mid ’30s.

Well, ol’ Henry thought so highly of Hitler that he corresponded with him regularly right through the end of the ’30s, and as a result, licensed the manufacture of his trucks to Der Fuhrer, as well as supplying him with engines and ancillary systems. So all those trucks in the videos, on their way to deliver troops and ordnance to the battlefields of Europe to kill American soldiers, many of whom worked on Henry’s assembly line in Dearborn? They were Fords.